Death City

by Sam West

  DEATH CITY: A ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE NOVELLA

  (BOOK ONE OF TWO)

  BY

  SAM WEST

  DEATH CITY: A ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE NOVELLA

  (BOOK ONE OF TWO)

  BY

  SAM WEST

  COPYRIGHT SAM WEST 2019

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book may not be reproduced or used in any way without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in book reviews. The characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Jesus, what’s with those bloody sirens?”

  Zara Hudson snuggled her face more firmly into her boyfriend’s chest, not particularly caring one way or the other what his answer might be. Tonight was their night, and nothing or no one was going to intrude upon it.

  “It’s eight O’clock on Saturday night, the pissheads are out in full force. You English, you like your lager, yes?”

  Zara pulled away slightly, playfully swatted Jean-Paul on his stomach, and he flinched as surely as if he had been disembowelled.

  “Hey, that hurts, mon petit lager lout.”

  “Says you, who drinks his own weight in red wine on a daily basis. Besides, I only drink lager when I’m out.”

  “It will make you into a fatty. Hey!”

  This time the playful swat was nearer a hard slap, but with Jean-Paul’s six-pack, she figured that her hand would be the equivalent of a fly battering against a pane of glass.

  “You’re a bastard.”

  “And you are the most beautiful, non-fat mademoiselle in the world.”

  “Whatever,” she grumbled, keeping her face resolutely flat against his chest, lest she should give him the satisfaction of seeing her smile.

  She knew he was lying, although perhaps lying was too strong a word. Love was blind, and all of that. The truth was, Jean-Paul was gorgeous, and she considered herself to be average looking at best. She thought that her figure was a shade too large at a size twelve to be considered model-beautiful, even if she was secretly rather proud of her D-cup breasts. Her light brown hair was perpetually lank, seemingly incapable of holding a curl and she felt that her features were rather plain. Not ugly, exactly, but just bland.

  She wasn’t a vain woman, however, and mostly didn’t give her looks much thought. She scrubbed up okay, and only now that she was with such a gorgeous man did her perceived plainness bother her.

  Sometimes, in an occasional fit of insecurity, she didn’t feel special enough to be with a man like Jean-Paul, for it wasn’t like she had a brilliant career to offset her rather pedestrian looks, seeing as she was a manager of a shoe shop. Sure, she got paid more than the minimum wage, hence she could afford the rent on this place even before Jean-Paul moved in, but she knew perfectly well that she was neither brilliant nor beautiful. Jean-Paul, on the other hand, was beautiful and brilliant – he was a neurologist in the private sector where his bosses in Paris had sent him over to the UK to be the frontman of their start-up venture in Ashburn.

  “I feel your smile through my t-shirt,” he said.

  Yes, she was just an ordinary girl, even if Jean-Paul did manage to make her feel like a million bucks.

  “Don’t be stupid. I am merely grimacing from your French garlic fumes. Hey!” She burst into helpless giggles when he removed his arm from around her shoulders, pinned her to the brown-leather sofa and tickled her waist. “Okay! Okay, stop, please stop.”

  Jean-Paul did, because for all his playful arrogance and dominance, he always knew exactly how far to push her. Sitting up once more, he shuffled forward to retrieve his glass of red wine on the glass coffee-table that was level with their knees. As he sipped his wine, Zara also hauled herself into a sitting position, watching him watch the film, finding herself admiring the strong lines of his profile – the strong, typically Mediterranean nose, dark complexion and heavy-lidded, deep set eyes. At twenty-eight, he was the same age as her, but in many ways she always thought that he seemed much older. It was nothing to do with sagging jowls or wrinkles – quite the contrary, in fact – but merely the knowing look in his dark, soulful eyes and the gravitas with which he carried himself.

  “You are staring at me,” he said without turning to look at her.

  She reached for her wine. “Am not.”

  A smile twitched at a corner of his full mouth. “I feel your eyes boring into me. You cannot get enough of my handsome face.”

  “Jesus, your arrogance knows no bounds.”

  He turned to smile at her then, and, despite the fact they had been an item for seven months and living together for two of those, her heart kicked like a mule. Jean-Paul got to his feet, laughing as he did so, pushing back his thick mane of chin-length, black hair off his forehead with both hands.

  “Why don’t you find another film for us to watch?” he asked, still standing there with his hands entwined in his hair, his feet planted some distance apart like he was posing for a photoshoot. “I need a cigarette.”

  She couldn’t help but laugh – he really was the limit and she had never met a man quite like him – as in, a guy who was so up himself but in an entirely ironic way.

  “It was you that chose this lame movie, and you shouldn’t smoke. It’ll kill you,” she called after his departing back. “I mean, really, you’re supposed to be a health professional.”

  “You ex-smokers, you are the worst.”

  Except he pronounced it as ze vorst, and she couldn’t help but laugh. She watched him disappear through the living-room door and out into the hallway, where she promptly heard the click of the front door opening. As soon as he did so, the noise of the sirens grew louder still – a whole army of emergency service vehicles screeching up their street, by the sound of things.

  She frowned. Sure, Ashburn saw its fair share of violence and just general, siren-filled misery that one would expect from living in a city, but shit. There were a lot of sirens tonight. It wasn’t like they even lived on a main road; Tontine Street could hardly be classed as a side street, but as a general rule, neither did what seemed like the entirety of Ashburn’s emergency services scream down here at one-hundred miles per hour on a daily basis.

  Sighing heavily, she turned her attention to the laptop, which was perched on the glass coffee table and plugged into the back of the TV by a USB cable. She red-crossed the movie – some lame action movie that Jean-Paul had picked then had the audacity to moan about it in that arrogant way of his that should’ve been annoying but really wasn’t – and opened the search engine to find another.

  “A romcom it is, then,” she muttered, smirking to herself as she sipped her wine.

  Jean-Paul wasn’t outwardly the most romantic soul, but she knew that he was a big softie at heart. The moment they had met still felt like a dream to her. There he had been that night, a man who could’ve had anyone in that pub, but he had wanted her. It was every cliché going when their eyes had met across that crowded room, and ever since that moment they hadn’t stopped laughing together. He had chosen her, so who was she to argue?

  The heart wants what it wants.

  The smile dropped from her lips as those bloody sirens felt like they were going on for-bastard-ever, cutting through her loved-up, vaguely euphoric haze. And not only that, against the backdrop of the wailing sirens she could hear shouting.

  Although, the shouting was nearer screaming.

  It’s just the drunks going up to The Hare and Hound, she told herself. The pub next door to the corner shop at the very end of their street could get notoriously rowdy, but even so. The pissheads didn’t normally make this much noise about it all.

  She was just about to type When Harry Met Sally into the search bar, when the cries intensifi
ed. And it sounded like they were coming from the front garden.

  Not only that, it sounded like Jean-Paul.

  Her blood turned to ice in her veins, and her heart instantly started to hammer.

  “What the hell is going on out there?” she muttered, jumping to her feet.

  It couldn’t be Jean-Paul, she told herself. It was just the drunks.

  But something was wrong. She didn’t know what was wrong, but she could feel it, just the same. At least the blaring immediacy of the sirens had diminished somewhat, even though she could still hear them in the middle distance – lots of them, seeming to come from everywhere all at once.

  Yes. The sirens, the shouting, all of it; wrong.

  Barefoot, she padded over to the living room door, peering around it. Annoyingly, the front door at the end of the short hallway of their three-bedroom semi-detached had swung almost completely shut, obscuring her view. A wave of irritation swept through her; why couldn’t Jean-Paul go out the kitchen door to smoke? Why did he always insist on standing in the bloody front garden?

  It is because I like to watch the life on the street, he always said.

  “Jean-Paul?” she called.

  No answer.

  Where the bloody hell was he? She told herself that he had probably just wandered down the garden path, as he was apt to do, when smoking. Unlike her, he wasn’t dressed for bed, and still wearing his jeans and a plain, black t-shirt. He hadn’t even taken off his Converse trainers tonight.

  And she told herself that it wasn’t him screaming.

  “Jean-Paul?” she called again, more urgently this time, pausing to listen.

  The drunks causing the commotion were silent now, clearly having moved up the road.

  Shivering, despite the warmth of the August night, she wrapped her arms around herself in the flimsy, near threadbare and tight, Grumpy Cat t-shirt she wore, teamed with the chequered pink pyjama bottoms.

  Maybe he’s lying dead on the street.

  What was wrong with her? Why would she even think such a thing?

  The more she strained her ears, standing there clutching the living-room door, she realised that she could still hear shouting – not in their street, perhaps, but from somewhere relatively nearby. Raised voices and car horns blared, and the constant wail of sirens in the middle distance wrapped coldly around her, chilling her to the core.

  It sounds like bloody Armageddon out there.

  Once again, the distinctive wail of an ambulance’s siren came screaming down her street, making her jump.

  “For Christ’s sake,” she muttered, striding the short distance over towards the front door.

  Her hand rested on the doorknob, ready to fling it open, but a sudden, cold rush of fear surged through her, paralysing her in its intensity.

  And only then, now that just an ajar door separated her from the street, and the immediate wail of the passing sirens had passed off, did she hear the other noises of the night.

  At first, she thought the noise was that of a snuffling dog, then she thought that maybe those wet, smacking noises were being made by some other animal – like a fox feasting on the contents of an overturned dustbin.

  Why the hell hasn’t Jean-Paul shooed the bloody thing away?

  Because he’s dead, came the sure, but sickening thought.

  “Jesus,” she muttered, flinging open the door once and for all, horrified by the turn her thoughts were taking.

  She stared in unseeing horror at the sight which greeted her, seeing it, but not immediately able to take it in. The gasp of terror lodged in her throat and the small porch tilted around her.

  Jean-Paul lay on his back on the pavement just beyond their opened, wrought-iron gate. Crouched over him were two figures with their faces mashed into his guts.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It looked like the two figures crouched over her boyfriend were eating him. And it sure sounded like it too. Those disgusting, wet smacking noises were undeniably coming from them.

  She blinked. She was hallucinating, complete with accompanying auditory soundtrack, there was no other explanation. The nearest streetlight opposite the next set of conjoined houses down from theirs had been out for a few weeks now, plunging their front garden into shadows at night. And that’s all this was – a trick of the shadows.

  Even when the fatter of the two figures raised his head to look at her, she still believed that she was seeing things; she still refused to acknowledge the way in which he continued to chew. His jaw bobbed and swayed dramatically, his lips opening and closing with all the grace of a masticating bovine: Smack, smack smack.

  It was too dark to make out his expression, or indeed, the details of his features, but there was no mistaking the emptiness in his eyes. In the gloom, they appeared as empty sockets, and the dark smudges smearing his cheeks and ringing his mouth sent a chill coursing through her. A distant part of her recognised that those dark smudges were blood – Jean-Paul’s blood.

  Yet still she didn’t act. Even when this chomping man lurched unsteadily to his feet, still she didn’t move. He stood there swaying on the spot, eyeing her up, and chewing.

  Now his friend stood up as well, also noisily smacking his lips. In a fleeting second, she took in his relative youth – seventeen if a day, if she were to hazard a guess – all gangly limbs, pencil neck, narrow shoulders and the seat of his baggy jeans hanging obligatorily somewhere above his knees.

  Her gaze darted to the unmoving body of her boyfriend. That numbness shrouded her, pushing back the panic and terror that she could sense, somewhere in the distance.

  “Jean-Paul.” His name lodged in her throat, emerging as a harsh whisper. “Jean-Paul,” she said again, louder this time.

  “Ugh-rurr-gurgh,” the shorter, older man said, between that disgusting – quite insane – chewing.

  Familiarity tugged at the edges of her mind – there was just something about that bald head and the thickened girth in the cheap, pinstripe suit that she felt she knew…

  “Mr Tyldesley?” she gasped in a sudden rush of recognition.

  She didn’t know his first name – all she knew was that he lived four doors down on the right, that he was unmarried, and that he worked in finance, or some such thing.

  “Urgh,” he said, taking a stumbling step towards her.

  As he took that step, he tripped over Jean-Paul’s body and landed flat on his face as surely as a felled tree, seemingly not even attempting to stick out his hands to break his fall. He lay there unmoving, his face mashed into the concrete pavement, his fat body lying on top of Jean-Paul.

  “Jean-Paul,” she cried again, that numbness still permeating her body and mind, preventing her from thinking clearly – preventing her from doing anything.

  The horror was too much to take in, and, not even when the teenaged lad took a step towards her – managing not to trip over her boyfriend like Mr Tyldesley had done – did she so much as move a muscle.

  Dimly, she became aware of more shouting drifting her way from beyond the front garden – shouts and screams that were too close for comfort, set against the backdrop of the constant sirens in the middle distance. The wail of a car alarm coming from somewhere to her left punctuated the air, joining in with what she was slowly realising to be the utterly insane sounds of this Saturday night.

  The boy took another, lurching step towards her.

  “Stay back,” she called out to him. “Stay back, or I’ll call the police.”

  The threat was pathetic and she knew it, further belittled by the fact she was dressed in her pyjamas and her smartphone was back in the living room.

  He groaned in reply, and her blood turned to ice in her veins.

  What the fuck is happening tonight? What is wrong with them?

  She didn’t even want to think about what they had done to Jean-Paul

  (they were eating him dear God help me they were eating him)

  and the fear was slowly but surely taking hold, seeping coldly through her bon
es, rendering her too scared to call his name.

  Because on some level, she knew that he was dead. It wasn’t something that she was consciously ready to admit, but deep down, she knew it.

  “Urgh gerr rurgh,” the boy said, shuffling towards her.

  Yes, she thought. Shuffling. Because he looked like a shuffling, lurching zombie, straight out of The Walking Dead or a Romero movie.

  Every ten seconds or so, a car swooped down her road, as was roughly the normal volume of traffic for Tontine Street. The boy was now halfway down her driveway and had less than ten metres to go before he reached her.

  Her limited options ran through her mind in a matter of seconds; the way she saw it, she had two choices – flag down a car or get herself inside, lock the door, and call the police.

  Flagging someone down might prove to be a challenge, as the only way out of the front garden was through the gates at the end of the short and narrow driveway, and she really didn’t fancy stepping over Jean-Paul and Mr Tyldesley, who was currently writhing on top of her boyfriend, like he was trying to get to his feet. Not to mention that this would mean navigating her way around zombie-boy.

  Next to the driveway was the small front lawn, which was edged with six-foot-high conifers that also separated her from the adjoining house next door – there was no way that she would be able to squeeze herself through that dense foliage.

  Fleetingly, her gaze settled upon her car, which was parked in front of the garage where Jean-Paul’s was stashed. His company car – a brand-spanking-new Alfa Romeo – was infinitely grander than her beat-up old Corsa, so his got pride of place under shelter. But it wasn’t like she had her car-keys on her, so that idea was dismissed in less time than it took for her to glance at the vehicle.

  That left only one option – get the fuck inside the house and call the police.

  “I’m sorry,” she sobbed to Jean-Paul, knowing in her heart of hearts that he couldn’t hear her, anyway.